Pocahontas Through The Years

Young Indian Woman The Focus Of Artwork, Legend And New Film

October 30, 1994|By MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON Daily Press

RICHMOND — In mid-1607, she was a 12-year-old Indian girl who cartwheeled naked through the fort at Jamestown.

By year's end, she'd become the princess who cradled Capt. John Smith's head in her arms, saving the brash explorer from the executioner's club and at the same time preventing the destruction of the first English settlement in the New World.

That heroic act, coupled with her conversion to Christianity and her marriage to John Rolfe in 1614, made Pocahontas an internationally known figure when she visited the court of England's King James I as a young woman of 21.

But it marked only the beginning of her legend.

Over the next 400 years, the Indian princess' story would be told again and again, taking on extraordinary new forms and meanings with each retelling. Yet, only now, with the opening of a new exhibit at the Virginia Historical Society, has anyone tried to systematically reconstruct both her life and the cascade of images it spawned.

"It's not only a great story, but the way it's developed and changed in the popular imagination over the years is a great story in itself," says Historical Society curator William M.S. Rasmussen, who also co-authored the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit.

"Practically everybody has seen her differently over the years - despite the fact that there is only one credible image."

With more than 100 paintings, prints and other artifacts on view, "Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend" is the largest and most comprehensive look at the famous Indian.

Still, Rasmussen says, it illustrates only a fraction of the attention her story has generated over the years.

From a smattering of accounts penned by Smith and a handful of other colonists - some of which have been disputed by later historians - her brief life has sparked tremendous interest from the beginning.

During the 17th century alone, thousands of English and European readers marveled at the descriptions of her adventures in popular travelogues. Nearly four centuries later, millions of viewers are expected to turn out worldwide for a soon-to-be-released Walt Disney film.

Surprisingly, most of the essential elements of her legend seem to spring from events reported by relatively reliable observers. Even Smith's frequently questioned rescue story, which was never attacked by his contemporaries yet later became a target of Northern propagandists during the Civil War, has never been decisively disproved, Rasmussen says.

That something important happened during Smith's imprisonment seems certain. Soon after his return from captivity, Pocahontas followed, bearing badly needed provisions as well as the promise of better relations with her father, Powhatan, and his people.

"All the existing evidence suggests that the historical Pocahontas was very special - bright, energetic, intelligent, her father's favorite," Rasmussen says.

"At a very young age, she was in a position to take some meaningful action, and she did. The settlement at Jamestown might not have survived without her and the things she did to help."

Still, the facts of Pocahontas' life began to mix with fiction almost as soon as they took place.

Her 1616 trip to visit London and the court of James I may have been as carefully stage-managed as any public relations ploy seen today, Rasmussen says.

Eager to drum up support for its struggling Jamestown colony, the Virginia Company presented Pocahontas in Western garb, giving her a high, tightly buttoned neckline to hide her traditional Indian tattoos and suggest an air of Christian chasteness.

"She looked like a European woman. She was intelligent. She was refined," Rasmussen says.

"It was a big difference from what people expected - a huge public-relations coup."

Pocahontas' Anglicization continued into the 18th century, when an original 1616 engraving of her by Simon van de Passe was reworked to display more Western facial features.

The same image probably served as the model for the famous "Booten Hall" portrait - a late-18th-century painting once thought to have been taken from life - that further lightened her hair and skin.

In the early 19th century, Pocahontas became a figure of high romance, partly because of the influence of French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's highly popular notion of the "noble savage." In Virginia, she commanded the devotion of a near-deity, especially after her descendants, the Bollings, married into the powerful Randolph clan.

Though the family preserved such relics as a pair of earrings and two buttons thought to have been worn by Pocahontas - as well as a brick reputed to have been taken from her Henrico County house - they still argued heatedly about the authenticity of such representations as the "Turkey Island" portrait.

Once believed to have been painted from life in England, this image and its copies ignited an ugly debate that was reported in the Richmond Enquirer, Rasmussen says.